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More dice

If you’ve visited my place in recent years, you’ll see that I take a different approach to the concept of dice tower:

Over the past five decades, I’ve accumulated lots of dice. I’ve got so many that I’ve used some of the oldest ones as tests for miniatures paints.

I used to keep the dice in cloth bags. Except when I rarely pulled them out for a specific game, I never looked at them. They lived in the shadows for decades, huddling in misery, waiting to be loved.

Then my friend John shared an image of a space rack being used to store dice. That struck me as a great idea. I got two racks and promptly filled up most of the jars.

My dice mostly still go unused, but at least I look at them once in a while.

For example, here’s a spice jar filled with “Tiger’s Eye” D6s. No, these are not made of actual gemstones!

I still have dice that are not in those dice towers. For example, this D120 is much too big to fit in a jar.

This 24-sided D-Total die is too big to fit as well. It’s labeled so that it can be used as a replacement for the standard platonic solids, and (with potential re-rolls) to function from D2 to D100.

What does someone need who has more dice than they can ever use?

You guessed it: More dice.

These came in the mail today as fulfillment of a Kickstarter campaign:

Those are “gyroid dice.” They’re used to roll the same numeric range as standard tabletop role-playing game dice (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20). The difference is that, apart from the D20, they have more sides than the platonic solids, so they roll better.

According to Wyrmwood, “High Variance dice are dice that have been shifted to exaggerate extreme results, without sacrificing the overall average value of the rolls.” The middle numbers are replaced with more extreme numbers. The numbers on the d20 are 1,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,5,6,15,16,17,18,18,19,19,20,20,20. The average of the die is still 10 so it is still “fair.”

That last one is controversial. In critical situations, it accentuates the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. If it had been available for my BG3 die-roll efforts, I might have used it.

For what it’s worth, although I enjoy owning the more exotic dice, I’m not a dragon about my collection. If you’re ever at my place and you need some D6s or D20s, just ask!

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